We know what Jordan Peterson values. But the vexing question is this: Does it matter how he arrives at his rules? Here's my review of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson (Toronto: Random House Canada; 409 pp., $25.95).

This year, the Democrats held forth for your consideration Joe Kennedy III, who bravely drew his silver spoon on behalf of blue-collar wage-earners, the military, and law enforcement, but also in defense of Dreamers, the transgendered, and feminist protest-marchers.

The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not worth the cost. Why? Because the problem with having a Department of Education transcends questions of how tax dollars ought to be spent. Set aside the Current Occupant’s temptation to “incentivize” behavior by withholding federal funds for state budgets, unless Common Core or No Child Left Behind or the Paleoconservative Plan for America be implemented. …

In Sarasota, Florida, just days before All Hallow’s Eve, the University Town Center Mall got caught with its red-velvet trousers down. It was then that choral groups scheduled to perform at the UTC Mall during the Christmas Shopping Season received the glad tidings that there was to be “no recognizable Christian music” sung.

The Obama administration is careful not to define extremism because, if it did, we might be able to evaluate the definition. We are simply supposed to know what it means, and if we claim that we don’t know, we might just be extremists ourselves.

The world of work has gobbled up church life and politics, so that words like Christian and conservative and liberal correspond merely to a particular flavor of the five-year plans that once characterized communism and now characterize Western society.

A handful of Muslims brutally murdered some French cartoonists for blaspheming their holy man. Have we learned something new from this? Yes, it turns out Muslims (well, the fundamentalist types, not many, but more than you’d think, although not the majority, but a significant number, in no way “all,” but in some sense “all”) don’t believe in free speech, although we Westerners know that God wrote “free speech” on tablets of stone, and emblazoned a desire for it onto all human hearts. And free speech is, of course, the cornerstone of Western society (whatever that now is). Ergo, the Muslims (some, not all, but a lot, though not too many)…

Theology, Dr. Harold O.J. Brown insisted, “is, to a large extent, a reaction against heresy.” The Church proclaims Her truth, based on revelation, and men “take it out of context” or perceive it to be “inadequate or unsatisfying.” Thus, for him, heresy has a “positive side,” for it stimulates careful theological discussion and formulation. And that formulation, in turn, guards and preserves the “faith once delivered to the saints.”